Coveted by Fortune 500 behemoths and courted literally from
their first steps on campus, the graduates of the Harvard Business
School have historically enjoyed the dizzying spoils that come from
earning a spot in the nation's most prestigious MBA program.
Matriculation at HBS has historically been the gateway to
high-profile positions in investment banking and consulting.

It's a de facto farm system for producing talent that top
firms court the way a professional sports team trades up in the
draft order to grab an all-American. Contact between those in the
program and potential employers and recruiters is closely
regulated, and the Fortune 500 have traditionally enjoyed the
advantage of name recognition and deep pockets in landing HBS
graduates upon graduation.

The Internet revolution changed all that. Buoyed by the dizzying
procession of fast wealth and a subversion of the time-proven
paradigms of business, the HBS Class of 2000 stood for more than
just the numerical symbolism of a new era. Their post-graduation
strategy was a wildly different one than that of their
predecessors. People were getting rich, small dotcoms were enjoying
unprecedented stock valuations, and the buzz was hitting the HBS
grapevine with all the aplomb of a new kid in town taking the place
by storm, with the Old Economy and its prospects suddenly relegated
to the agate type.

Their stories have both a common thread and unique elements
among them, and the lessons learned will endure, even if the dotcom
revolution didn't.

Remember
Webvan?
As a former Army captain with a background in production, Dan
Krehnbrink, 31, hardly fits the stereotype of the downsized dotcom
dreamer. He entered HBS with a desire to get exposure to different
areas of business and augment his business skills--not an unusual
criterion, nor a foolhardy one. As his graduation date approached
in June 2000, Krehnbrink couldn't help but notice the deluge of
new ideas and concepts among his classmates.

"Everyone was walking around with four or five business
plans in their pocket," Krehnbrink says. "It was obvious
there was a lot more excitement about what was going on and things
to be learned."

Still cautious as graduation loomed, and having reviewed
numerous dotcom opportunities, Krehnbrink took a program manager
position with Webvan's operations wing. His decision was based
on the merits of a business plan that seemed relatively robust
compared to most in the industry.

One of the more relevant ideas of the dotcom boon, Webvan
operated a catch-all home delivery service for groceries and was a
fitting metaphor for the fast-paced climate that spawned its
inception: Those who didn't have time to shop could simply have
someone else do it for them, obviating the nettlesome problem of
the 8 p.m. run to the store after a 12-hour workday.

"Our long-term plan was to [start] out with groceries, and
then branch into electronics, pet foods, etc.," says
Krehnbrink. "I saw a lot of flaky business models, then looked
at Webvan and said, 'Here's a company that has a lot of
assets.' In retrospect, the problem was too many
assets."

The company's notable linchpins were its enormous
distribution centers, located from Chicago to Los Angeles. Once the
home delivery business caught on, these high-tech distribution
spheres would form the backbone of a nationwide network to help the
company sustain the projected growth.

"It was an incredibly big plan, and a product of the market
at the time was to get big fast. There were hundreds of thousands
of square feet in these distribution centers," Krehnbrink
recalls. "Somebody had done the analysis that we could break
even by selling so much, but the costs were much higher than
anticipated."

Fittingly, the day Krehnbrink arrived in California to start
working for the company, Webvan acquired HomeGrocer, a chief
competitor. Already feeling the bite of a rapid expansion
punctuated by soaring infrastructure costs, his position in the
operations department was further complicated by the directive from
management to identify and implement HomeGrocer's best
practices in an effort to streamline costs: "Their facilities
were much more streamlined, and their technology platform was not
as complicated. In retrospect, I wish we could've started in a
simpler format like HomeGrocer and added complexity as we added
profitability."

The company, feeling the financial crunch of not meeting its
goal to raise $1 billion to reach its operational goals, laid off
Krehnbrink, along with 2,000 other employees, in July 2001. Yet
Krehnbrink speaks positively about his experience and evidenced no
ill will about his 13-month whirlwind ride.

"Webvan recruited a lot of people with a consulting
background, and I have a tremendous respect for the talent that was
there. Perhaps we hired people who were too talented," he
says. Currently in bankruptcy proceedings with numerous creditors,
Webvan is still operating with a skeleton staff to sift through the
fallout of the post-boom aftermath.

At this article's writing, Krehnbrink was waiting for an
offer on a program manager position from an established firm.
"I don't want to name names," he adds, only
half-kidding. "But I don't have dreams of working for a
dotcom. I've been talking to more traditional companies
that've been around for 10 or more years. I still feel there is
tremendous industry in the concept, though." His future goals
are geared toward getting more experience in technology platform
development.

Another One Bites the Dust

Compared to the relative sensibility of Webvan's model,
Kibu.com was the classic case of a highfalutin dotcom that
disintegrated as the industry entered its revaluation phase in
mid-2000. Hired as director of technology, Arcadia Kim liked the
concept of marketing exclusively to teenaged girls. Among
Kibu.com's oeuvre of marketing strategies were chat rooms, Web
site personalities that gave advice on everything from school to
makeup, and an accompanying retail and entertainment venture
designed to capture and convert teenage girls into loyal users.

"My job was probably the most interesting one I ever
had," Kim says. "Once a month I would get dressed up and
do a photo shoot and write a column. There was a lot of high energy
and shifting goals. Almost immediately upon being hired, I started
questioning the business model. My responsibilities were to
implement core technologies on the site to connect to teens, with
content, community and commerce attached to it."

Kim's sense of alarm, which started "almost
immediately" upon being hired after graduation, was compounded
by the fact that virtually everything at Kibu.com flew in the face
of what she'd learned at HBS and in the business world:
"When you're on the outside looking in, all you see is the
hype. The whole Internet bubble was about dreamers being about to
dream, and when you want to believe something, you will take
everything in your heart to believe it." Kim was laid off in
September 2000 along with most of Kibu's staff, and the company
returned nearly half of the $22 million in venture capital the
following month, a rare act of probity in an industry where Other
People's Money was burned through as fecklessly as it was
ventured.

Now happily ensconced in Silicon Valley, of all places, Kim, 29,
landed her dream job 18 months ago as a director of development
with Electronic Arts. A longtime video game junkie, she's doing
what she's always wanted to do, and she's working on a
Lord of The Rings video game for Playstation 2. "My
whole dotcom experience has turned into the cornerstone of my
experience. Managing risks and learning how organizations work is
just sort of ingrained in me now," she says. "I talked
about it a lot while I was interviewing with EA. I took an
entry-level position with them on the production side, where there
aren't too many MBAs. Ultimately I learned what was really
important was setting expectations about what can happen in
one's career."

The Road Ahead

While Kim was lucky enough to bounce from a dotcom misstep to an
ideal job, other HBS grads are still milling in the wake of the
layoffs, trying to retool their approach and find the shoe that
fits. Maya Dani, 29, started with Gorefer.com in August 2000, and
immediately was waist-deep in the ensuing organizational chaos that
ultimately led to her leaving the company in December 2000.

"Gorefer.com was building technology for people to use the
Internet as a platform for sales leads. They wanted to target every
market, and for various reasons we began on the home improvement
side," Dani says. "We would pay people $2 for leads, and
then a partner would pay us twice that."

Like all HBS alumni, Dani's business acumen didn't jibe
with the frenetic positioning efforts and constantly changing focus
of the company. Four years' experience in investment banking
didn't help her achieve the suspension of disbelief that seemed
so readily available to coworkers.

With a '95 HBS grad also working at Gorefer.com, her
reservations were only compounded by a fellow alum trying to make
sense of the situation. The two were in constant conversation with
the CEO--they tried to sway him to adopt a more centered, prudent
approach, but it didn't take. The repercussions of the 2K
slowdown were immediate, and 20 percent of the staff was laid off
two weeks after her arrival. "I was hired as director of
business development, then I sort of became director of marketing.
I was whatever I wanted to be," Dani adds, a whimsical
recollection underscored with the clarity of hindsight. "The
CEO was spending more time in-house when he should have been
pounding the pavement."

Gorefer.com closed for good in February 2001, after having
raised $12 million in venture capital--a relatively small figure by
the industry standards at the time. Meanwhile, Dani took a job in
banking, left that, and then worked as a consultant for five
months. She's still looking for that proper mix of structure
and entrepreneurial spirit.

"I ended up quitting the banking job after six months. I
decided if I was miserable, I should just leave," she says.
"The decision to leave Gorefer was the beginning of several
cascading events in my life. I really felt like many of my
classmates at HBS, and I felt we could think up the next great idea
as opposed to thinking out a long-term plan.

"I think my expectations were really high coming out of B
school. I talk to headhunters, but quite honestly I am not putting
100 percent into my job hunt. I am really nervous about picking the
right thing. Just this last week I've really started
looking."

"What was interesting," says Kim, reflecting on the
dotcom effect on the Class of 2000, "was that HBS was a
reflection of what was going on in the market at that
time."

With hard roads behind them and lessons learned, the Class of
2000 is taking the road back, one that is uniquely theirs.

THE TRAGICOMEDY OF ERRORS

"The entire thing
was a giant Ponzi scheme," contends Tom Arnold, 30, another
member of HBS 2000. "It was essentially the process of waiting
as long you could until the other guy got chicken and sold
out."

Arnold, who interned at Chipshot.com during
the summer of 1999, was not swayed by the alluring dotcom industry
upon graduation, but he still got laid off as a consultant for
Booz-Allen-Hamilton in November 2001 despite playing it smart and
going for the "old school" approach upon
graduating.

Ponzi scheme or not, there was a definite
undercurrent of weirdness at the epicenter, and I recall it well
working as a Web hosting consultant in Silicon Valley in 2000.
Finding myself deemed an expert on hosting at all of 28 years young
due to a background in facilities management, I had the job of
giving 15 to 20 top-down weekly facility tours. Typically the CEO,
CIO, COO and all the other acronymed employees were under 30,
leading these groups; the thirtysomething midlevel-management types
stayed back in the second echelon with the elder bean counters in
silent tow.

Dress code was inverted according to rank,
and more often than not, you could pick out the CEO according to
who had the loudest shirt. As large companies go, this one was a
little slow to send the higher-ups to investigate this suddenly
lucrative end of the business, but like smart middlemen, they
stocked up on Levi's and shovels after the gold rush kicked in.
One group of East Coast headquarters heavy-hitters materialized
unexpectedly one day, clad in garishly overdone suit-and-tie
getups. The dominant monkey of the group lit into me for wearing
the business casual retinue that was standard fare in dealing with
dotcom companies.

"Does anybody have a jacket this guy
can wear for today's tours?" he asked, horrified. The
tactful rebuttal to this overture was that a) This is the West
Coast, and therefore anybody in a tie is not perceived as
tech-savvy, and b) dotcommers tend to trust people who look like
them. Walk the walk, talk the talk, and make small talk as
prescribed were the proven keys to making the sales.

Unfazed by this perfectly logical line of
reasoning, Mr. Old Guard stalked furiously into the break room to
find my superior, who was engaged in a heated foosball match. His
party of a half-dozen suited cohorts, looking a little uneasy at
the exchange, waved me off and urged me to disappear for my own
safety, job-related and otherwise. I nodded and met my appointment,
a trio of start-up folks whose CEO was named Boogie.

In the end it all came tumbling down, of
course. But for one brief flash, I witnessed something brilliant
and funny and patently untypical. Things have since returned to
normal, thankfully, as many of us, no doubt, have stocked up on
ties in anticipation of returning to its environs.

Jason Probst is a freelance writer in Southern California. He
has written for ESPN, maxfighting.com and Gridlockmag.com, among
other publications. His next project is comprising a dotcom
business plan written entirely in Haiku.